How to make wheat stalk stiffer in Cloth Physics?
I recently found out about the Surface Deform Modifier, so I decided to try that on the wheat. I surrounded the wheat with a low-poly mesh, and gave the low-poly mesh the cloth modifier instead. To keep this mesh from falling over, I added pinning to a few vertices I extruded above the mesh. It works great now, not only because there is far less bending, but also because now I don't have to worry about the little hairs swinging all over the place.
Below is a screenshot of the wheat.